Welcome to the Working Week

A few tidbits to take you into Monday, the start of the first week of classes and parking cussin' and fussin'.

Early bettors are all over Maryland for Saturday's football season opener like thigh tats on Rhonda Ratchet. FIU opened as a 15-point underdog. Now, the line's up to 20. The over/under dropped from 54 to 49.5. Daggone, are people hitting the pawn shops to get down on this game? That's a large line movement from opening to kickoff, much less opening to five days before kickoff.

FIU's "radio" call of games once again can be accessed only through fiusports.com. Pete Pelegrin will do the play-by-play. Officially, the color analyst is "to be determined." This close to the season opener? Sounds like Pelegrin will be doing one of those 1940s Major League Baseball (or this decade's Florida Panthers) multi-tasking radio jobs where you do play-by-play, color, commercials, interviews and battle with dry mouth. Allowing that fans don't follow sports via radio the way they used to without being in the car, hunting for lawn gnomes and nobody's tossing more than Chiclets money, if that, at FIU to do the games, this doesn't look good. Radio coverage of football and basketball is a basic in Division I. This is about the image of the school. With getting the name of the school out there being the football team's main raison d'etre, not being on a radio station with a broadcast team kind of undercuts the purpose.

Not playing in the women soccer's season opening loss to Arizona Friday night were preseason all-conference player Chelsea Leiva and last year's second-leading scorer Scarlett Montoya. Injuries to those two would kneecap the season. Maybe not a red card, but definitely a yellow card for a team that has a chance to continue it's run of 10-win seasons.